The first reveal of AWS Re:invent 2014. Aurora a MySQL-compatible relational database engine to take on Oracle et al. Also lots of goodies for developers including continuous integration and a managed code repository.

FortyCloud’s security platform functions like a modern-day version of the firewall, built for the public cloud. The company is going after potential clients in the advertising technology sector, bioinformatics industry, and healthcare and financial services providers.

Kim Weins, vice president of marketing at RightScale, sees a lot about where its customers are deploying cloud workloads and how they intend to expand them across multiple platforms. She came on the Structure Show to talk about what’s hot, including — surprisingly — VMware.

IO, which is known for its modular data center designs and specialized data center management software, is getting into the cloud provider space with a new service called IO.Cloud. It’s very open at the foundational level, at least, running OpenStack software on Open Compute hardware.

On this week’s Structure Show a look at Google’s cloud prospects; how Netflix is engineering a way around last year’s Chrismas Eve snafu, and why startups should use Amazon’s cloud services — but stick with the basics.

Rackspace revenue continued to rise during the third quarter, but growth was slow and profits were down year over year. The company chalks up the latter to increased forward-looking investments, but the elephant in the room is Amazon.

North Bridge Venture Partners’ Paul Santinelli offered up all sorts of opinions — many outspoken — on this week’s Structure Show podcast. Here are some of his thoughts on who can succeed in the cloud computing market.

Most financial services companies officially forbid the use of public cloud (aka Amazon Web Services) completely. But the forward thinkers among them — like State Street — keep their options — and minds — open about such deployment in the future.

Zorawar Biri Singh, who leads HP’s cloud effort, says the company’s vision aligns nicely with what enterprises want. HP will fill in check marks to its OpenStack-based game plan next month but the big question is whether HP’s brand still carries weight.

At just a few months old, Google Compute Engine is seen as a threat to public cloud leader Amazon Web Services. At least that appears to be what Amazon thinks given its lawsuit against a former exec who is joining Google.

Twitter has been awash (again) with banter about the myth or reality of private clouds. The conversations revolve around the technology, rehashing the “what makes a cloud a cloud” argument. Yet, all of us are right, and many of us are wrong.

Optimists hope that the EU’s expected cloud computing recommendations will resolve concerns around diverse data protection laws that slow cloud adoption. Realists hope for the best, but prepare for less. The reality is Europe remains a collection of countries, not a unified whole.

When it comes to the debate on public versus private clouds or commodity versus legacy IT, there seems no room for nuance. So, while cloud and commodity IT are the way of the future, private cloud and legacy IT are here to stay.

At this stage, most companies know some of the benefits of cloud computing. But many still aren’t sure what applications and data should make the trip first. That’s why Rackspace and other cloud providers are providing more consultative services and lining up systems integrators.

Amazon Web Services is making available a new US West region located in Oregon, which it is positioning as a lower-cost alternative to the company’s existing Northern California region. AWS says services in the Oregon region costs about 10 percent less than in Northern California.

The next big leap in both technology and business models around sharing elastic compute resources will be bidding for those resources at auction or acquiring them through a broker, according to Forrester. But this broker business just adds more abstraction to an already abstract business.

Cloud services have a rosy future, but a long build-out industry cycle is expected as businesses are slow to adopt and accept virtual datacenters. Instead of determining to use a public or a private cloud, enterprises should consider a hybrid, best-of-both-worlds approach.

The current public cloud computing providers have done an excellent job in bringing innovation and cloud computing technology to the masses. Cloud computing, however, is not yet a fully evolved technology and may take another decade to grow up and deliver on its full potential.